I worked for AAAS and Science magazine at the time that they were first offering subscriptions to Science Online and then when they offered institutional access to the magazine. I was privy to som interesting meetings, which was like being the proverbial fly on the wall given that I am also a librarian.
Let me say that my former employer were among the good guys on the publisher side of this issue. They took significant risks in making the magazine available to libraries and laboratories at a time when competitors such as Nature where pussy-footing around. AAAS probably moved to fast in retrospect and hurt themselves. Offering institutional subscriptions was new and risk--we had little idea what it would do to the association's membership base.
The bad guys are the big STM publishers such as Elsevier. Librarians have been fighting Elsevier and others for 20 years in what we call the "serials crisis." Libraries have been forced to cut back on collections in order to buy expensive specialty journals. This is why open access journals are so attractive to librarians.
The main barrier to open access journals taking off has always been concerns over tenure. Scientists and researchers want to make sure that all of their publications will be deemed acceptable for tenure. From what I understand, these concerns over open publishing have died down, so it looks like open journals and open archiving will be the wave of the future.
Chuck
Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Cyberspace Redux: open access journals
> Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 08:37:13 -0500
> From: Ellen Moody <ellen2 at JIMANDELLEN.ORG>
> Reply-To: 18th Century Interdisciplinary Discussion
> <C18-L at lists.psu.edu>
> To: C18-L at LISTS.PSU.EDU
>
>
> I went to lecture by a librarian yesterday where she talked of issues in
> cyberspace which affect academics. Since her stance is one I took up
> when I last wrote about this, I thought I'd put a little of what she
> said on this list.